The Man in the Moon Stayed Up Too Late

"The Man in the Moon stayed up too late" by Lída Holubová

The Man in the Moon Stayed Up Too Late was a Hobbit poem composed by Bilbo Baggins.

History

The poem was composed by Bilbo Baggins sometime before T.A. 3001. In T.A. 3018, in The Prancing Pony at Bree, Frodo jumped on a table and recited "a ridiculous song" invented by Bilbo.

In the Fourth Age a similarly-titled poem was written in the Red Book, The Man in the Moon Came Down Too Soon, which however was inspired by Gondorian lore.

Form

The poem is in thirteen ballad-like five-line stanzas, introducing each element in turn: "the Man in the Moon" himself, the ostler's "tipsy cat that plays a five-stringed fiddle", the little dog, the "hornéd cow".

Poem excerpts

J.R.R. Tolkien reads The Man in the Moon Stayed Up Too Late

There is an inn, a merry old inn
beneath an old grey hill,
And there they brew a beer so brown
That the Man in the Moon himself came down
One night to drink his fill.

With a ping and a pong the fiddle-strings broke!
the cow jumped over the Moon,
And the little dog laughed to see such fun,
And the Saturday dish went off at a run
with the silver Sunday spoon.

The round Moon rolled behind the hill,
as the Sun raised up her head.
She hardly believed her fiery eyes:
For though it was day, to her surprise
they all went back to bed!

Publication history

The poem was a reworking of an earlier poem called The Cat and the Fiddle: A Nursery Rhyme Undone and its Scandalous Secret Unlocked. The original poem expanded upon the traditional English nursery rhyme The Cat and the Fiddle and was published in October/November 1923 within Yorkshire Poetry Vol. 2 No. 19. It was reprinted in The Return of the Shadow.

Tolkien eventually used it as the basis for a poem recited by Frodo Baggins in The Lord of the Rings, and published it as The Man in the Moon Stayed Up Too Late in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil.

Inspiration

Tom Shippey noted some elements on the Indo-European myth of Phaethon in the Man in the Moon's horses.

According to Tom Shippey and Thomas Honneger, the poem attempts to retroactively add depth to the anonymous nonsensical nursery rhyme; the "surviving" rhyme could be imagined as an artifact of that larger surviving rhyme from the Third Age.

George MacDonald had composed The True History of the Cat and the Fiddle (published in At the Back of the North Wind) in which he combined the nursery rhymes Hey Diddle Diddle and The Man in the Moon Came Down Too Soon. George Burke Johnston suggested that Tolkien was inspired by that poem.

Steven M. Deyo says the poem is based on the "Harley manuscript poem 2253".

Portrayals in adaptations

1978: The Lord of the Rings (1978 film):

Frodo sings an abridged version of the song at the Prancing Pony before falling off the table and accidentally slipping on the Ring for the first time, causing him to disappear and startle the patrons.

1981: The Lord of the Rings (1981 radio series):

Frodo sings the song in Bree. Speeding up at every line, he becomes nigh unintelligible near the end.

2002: The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (video game):

Frodo sings an abridged version at the Prancing Pony. The line fragment "And there they brew a beer so brown" was changed to "And there they make a stew so brown", presumably to censor references to alcohol. The Man in the Moon is said to have "flew down" rather than "c[o]me down" and he "eat"s his fill, rather than "drink"s his fill.

2006: The Lord of the Rings (musical):

The hobbits sing a version at the Prancing Pony. The lyrics are quite different.

2012: The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey:

In the Extended Edition of the film, Bofur sings an abridged version in Rivendell while the Company dines with the Elves, and the other Dwarves join in.

Other media

A musical version of this poem was recorded by the Tolkien Ensemble on their album An Evening in Rivendell.